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[Product Interview Question] How would you improve Yahoo Finance

Gave myself a hypothetical product question and wrote out my answer in one sitting. Let me know any tips on how I can improve.

Business Goal and Jobs to Be Done

• Yahoo creates a variety of media, technology, and business platforms to connect hundreds of million of people around the world to the things they love (Sports, Fantasy, Finance, Entertainment etc.)
• Yahoo Finance is branded as the #1 finance site for savers, traders, and investors. Although the platform has both a website and mobile application, I’ve primarily used the mobile app and will focus on that.
• The job to be done for this platform is to provide financial news, data, reports, and some tools for personal finance management.
• The app can be used both passively and actively. A passive interaction requires minimal cognitive effort by the user and can be something as simple as quickly checking the current stock price or percent change. A more active user may dive deeper to look at latest news reports or analyze the financials.
• Lastly, I believe there are two ways Yahoo finance makes money: selling digital ad-space and forming partnerships with news reporter companies to have their stories featured or higher in the news feed. Therefore, user engagement is a massive priority.

Users

I segmented the users into two buckets based on their level of experience.

Beginner

• Beginner users are those with around 1–3 years of investing experience. They don’t have a lot of experience using the advanced tools (e.g. setting price targets).
• This user group is also probably still facing a steep learning curve and primarily looking at equity markets with a small chance of doing a thorough analysis of the financial statements or reports.
• I believe this group is definitely reading the news and related articles to each stock and potentially could have watchlists set up or a widget to track price movements of their favorite stocks.

Advanced

• Contrary to the beginners, this group is doing a deep dive into financial reports, financial statements, and perhaps even importing data to create their own valuation models.
• Yahoo Finance is just one of the many tools they use in conjunction with others to get a holistic view of a security that they are planning to invest in or tracking.

Prioritization

To prioritize which target market to pursue, there are a few factors I am considering: Largest addressable market, user type with the greatest friction.

• With these factors in mind, I believe that Beginner Investors is a more appealing market because they face a greater friction using the app and have the potential to be converted to Advanced investors.
• Additionally, with recent economic trends of everyone getting into investing, Yahoo can capitalize on this by becoming the one-stop shop for beginner investors.

Pain Points

• Vocabulary → There can be a lot of jargon for new investors and as they are still learning, they may not understand what everything means, having to google in between reading.
• Analysis → If they click on the analysis page or financials, they’ll be hit with an overwhelming amount of numbers which could be daunting to read and turn them towards doing more qualitative research.
• Trust → There’s multiple news sources that post articles on Yahoo Finance and it can be difficult to understand which perspective to trust and what information is valuable.

Prioritization

The criteria I’ll follow for prioritizing the pain points will be based on the impact of the pain point and the frequency (breadth & depth).

• Although there could be a lot of jargon for new investors, I think a simple Investopedia search could help solve that problem. It adds friction to the user experience, but it is not as impactful to the overall experience.
• There could be an interesting angle with the analysis pain point since the learning curve is steep for beginners and Yahoo finance could try to reduce this barrier of entry. Easier analysis tools could lead to more engagement on the app, an important metric for Yahoo.
• Lastly, not knowing which articles to read and trust could be an impactful problem if a user draws the wrong implication. However, assuming that the user reads more than one article on a particular subject, the impact of this problem shouldn’t be as dramatic.

For the reasons stated above, I’ll prioritize the analysis pain point.

Solutions

When thinking of the potential solutions for the analysis pain point, I thought of the different actions an user takes when completing a financial analysis on a company.

• Financials → Automatically calculate ratios and show competitor tables so the user can compare the company they’re looking at with others and industry averages. Information is always better understood when put into perspective and this can help beginner investors realize the perspective.
• Data Visualization → A common conception of investors is that they’re constantly working with Excel and rows/columns of data. This can be daunting for users and Yahoo can think of incorporating visuals to represent statistics rather than concrete numbers. This can be bar graphs, line graphs showing the growth in revenue, profit or pie & donut charts showing breakdown of costs in their operating expenses.
• Sentiment Analysis → This relates to reading articles slightly but is an important part of investing I believe. A solution that can show the overall sentiment of how users are feeling about the stock. Currently, that’s restricted to companies like Zack Ranks or Motley Fool that talk about whether a stock is a Buy, Hold, or Sell but if this could be expanded to general users, it could help the average investor.

Prioritizing

When prioritizing solutions, I want to think about the effort and impact of each solution. Effort relates to how many resources and time it will take to complete the solution. Impact relates to how much the user will benefit and how well this solution correlates with our mission statement. Overall, trying to estimate the Return on Investment of creating the solution.

• Data Visualization seems like the most appealing because the impact is high: Allows users to easily understand metrics and connect them to what they love. Additionally, having worked on dashboard projects before, creating visualizations isn’t intensive as long as you know the numbers you are working with and the visual you want, can treat each metric like a widget. This could allow for some customizability later in the future for each individual.
• Although the financial competitor table would be helpful in gaining perspective and comparison, users could still face a barrier in understanding “what defines a good number, between competitors”. However, the effort for this would be low as it’s just aggregating data from other stocks already on the platform.
• Sentiment analysis is a unique idea that I am fond of because it allows users to understand what the market sentiment is without being persuaded by eye-catching headlines. However, the effort for this solution would be high since sentiment analysis would require natural language processing and building machine learning models can take a lot of time and resources.

Overall, I’d like to pursue the data visualization solution.

Trade Offs

When I analyze trade-offs, I think in my head “When you are saying yes to something, you are saying no to something else”.

• As we say yes to data visualization, we are potentially saying no to users doing a deeper dive into the numbers and understanding the why behind it. However, I think that for beginner investors, it’s a good tradeoff because it eases them into the world of investing and something to think about in the future is maybe captions talking about why a graph looks the way it does.

Success Metrics

• # of users clicking on the visualization tab → An acquisition metric to make sure people are actually using it
• Time spent on visualization tab → For engagement, we want to ensure that people are spending a decent amount of time on this tab when assessing a company and can think about features to implement to increase this time.
• # Visualization Tabs Clicked / # of stocks looked at → A ratio to see how often they are looking at the visualizations compared to how many stocks they are browsing through.